THE PERSON WHO IS THE THERAPIST 
 
 
 Pamela Levin

An offhand remark truly can be the pivotal point for the direction of a life.  That's how it happened for me: I was living in Berkeley, having just moved there from Pensacola Florida and Boston, Mass, where I had held jobs in alcohol rehab and medical-surgical nursing, respectively.  With a friend one day, I remarked, "I need to get a job."  She responded with a question, “What would you do if you could do anything?"
 
 I was amazed at her question, certain that she was being flippant, so in like manner I responded, “I'd work with Eric Berne."  A few months earlier, I had been handed Games People Play by a nursing friend in Chicago.  I was very impressed with the book, and then a casual acquaintance somewhere told me these were the people who were claiming to cure alcoholics. 
 
 But my flippant friend turned out not to be flippant at all.  "Oh, Eric Berne," she said.  "I'll get you introduced to him."  It turned out another friend of hers, a social worker, was attending the Social Psychiatry Seminars in San Francisco. He asked Eric if I could attend, and received permission.  And so I went, quaking in my boots, a lowly 23 year old nurse venturing across the bay to spend Tuesday evening with Eric Berne. Veteran seminar attendees were jokingly referring to him as "The Great Pyramid", because so many people were flocking to see him that he had, in their opinion, taken on the status of one of the wonders of the world.
 
 In the two years since graduation from college and passing the nursing boards, I had been increasingly dissatisfied with the world of nursing as I'd experienced it.  Between the fantasy of how I wanted it to be and the reality of what I was required to do was not merely a little space, but a yawning chasm in which my frustration had plenty of room to fester.  I had gone through - perhaps endured is more accurate - one of the first collegiate nursing programs in the world: 5 1/2 years of college, including 20 hours of ward work per week crammed into 4 years and one summer.  The justification for all of this effort, we students had been drilled, was that we would be 'thinking nurses' capable of independent judgment, partners in a medical team and paid commensurate with our skills (you could almost hear the trumpets playing in the background.)  Hah!  In truth we graduates were anomalies in the nursing world.   Our college degrees and fifty cents would buy a cup of coffee.  Nobody wanted our opinions about anything, they just wanted us to get the meds out on time and shut up. 
 
 But then there was Eric, who said things like, 'If you really want to know what's going on with a patient, ask a nurse.'  And he included nurses and their opinions in team staff conferences at St.Mary's, the psychiatric hospital where he consulted.  And he wanted my opinion! So I knew I would have to have one, and a good one, or leave.  I decided to stay.  About this time the inner circle of the seminar -Claude Steiner, Muriel James, Steve Karpman, Pat Crossman, Jack Dusay, Dorothy Jongeward, Viola Callaghan, Ken Everts, Joe Concannon and others, were inventing a training program in T.A., in which you ended up with something called 'Clinical Membership'  in 'Eric's club'.  Eric's club was something they had irreverently named The International Transactional Analysis Association. They laughed about it because it had seemed so far fetched at the time that it would ever have an international member.  They were all clinical members, and  I wanted to be too.  I had no idea until years later that they had all been 'grandfathered' in.  
 
 It was difficult to find a place that would let some unknown nurse to sponsor me and let me do groups under supervision; I remain grateful to this day to the late Joe Concannon for sponsoring me, and to Pat Jarvis, psychiatrist, for letting me run groups on his ward at the Oakland Naval Hospital.  On completing my requirements, I went up for my clinical exam only to be told I'd flunked, not for not knowing the material, but for 'knowing it too well.' Shocked, and not knowing what else to do,  I refused to flunk and was told they had just made a special category called 'Limited Clinical Membership' which they were willing to grant me.  It meant I would be allowed to do TA only in clinics and hospitals under supervision.  I didn't want to be 'limited' anything: that's why I wanted out of hospital nursing! So I refused it and appealed their decision.  There was no appeal procedure at that time, so they invented one.  I got my exam fee back and, after much private wound-licking, retook the exam in six months.  I let them know that if I didn't pass this time, they'd be hearing from my lawyers.  The exam was a piece of cake, few examiners asked anything, and I passed.
 
 Later I found out that the ITAA board had to meet on Sunday to approve this "Limited Clinical Member" category, but my first exam was the previous Friday night!  Turns out that, since there were 450 unemployed social workers in the Bay Area during that time, people were afraid they were opening the floodgates to nurses and economic ruin would befall them.  But no such thing occurred; few nurses have become Clinical Members, and everybody thrived.  It was a lesson in potency.  I didn't like the way the lesson was taught, but I had to stick up for myself or not make it.  No more mousy nurse!
 
 Privately, even unconsciously, I know I was drawn to TA for both professional and personal reasons.  With my professional TA life beginning to be established, I could turn my attention to the personal.  Bottom line, this added up to wanting to stay close to Eric and the inner circle because I wanted to be first in line when they figured out how to fix it.
 
 Then, while I was setting up a day treatment program for a bay area private hospital, Jacqui Schiff came to do a day of demonstration of some new techniques, the labels of which were 'regressive work' and 'corrective parenting'.  Her contract son, Eric, played the guitar for staff and patients, and then in a few moments, transformed himself into a regressed, squealing infant.  I almost went through the roof.  If my job weren't at stake, I would have flown the coop like a frightened chicken.  I knew there was something here that spoke to a part of me I couldn't even name, and I HATED it.  But I also knew there was something here I was seeking.  So cautiously, I began to learn a little about it, keeping a careful distance, but attending Jacqui's seminars on occasion.  I was learning a little about how to do it ( and also some ways I would NOT do it).  Armed with that Adult information, I went in search of a place to do the work, looking for a safe place to land.  I found a few places, and was able to do my own personal regressive work in bits and pieces over the course of a few years until the right people appeared, and I was able to complete those unconscious Child motivations that had been such a powerful driving force in compelling me to hang in there with TA and the organization through all the rough spots.  Offering what I was learning to my clients became a natural outgrowth of that personal work.  It was like having a deep well from which to draw what I needed, and what they needed, too.  So in a sense, my dysfunctional childhood was transformed into a gift; because I was so uncomfortable, I was required to heal, and from that healing came the tools and resources to succeed professionally and to offer others who also needed them.
 
 To offer one example of what I mean, here is a scene:  
 
 In my adult life, the problem is, I am so tense and tight that I'm pulling my back out at night while I sleep.  I don't ever change position, and am always sleeping in the exact same position all night.  I follow this theme in regression, going back and back until I am six months old. I am in a hospital. My mother is nowhere, not even a vague presence.  I feel terrible.  Nurses occasionally come in and out of the room, sticking me with needles.  I cry, scream, but there is no comfort and finally I give up.  Then my father comes to see me, and again I cry to ask for help.  I am tied down, unable to move, with four straps, one on each appendage.  It is the exact same position in which I am sleeping in my adult life!  My father comes close to my crib, and hope rises, then falls.  He points to the nurses and is gone.  With my Child logic, I interpret the message:  "Be like them and you'll survive." That's the exact moment I decided to be a nurse.  In regressive work with a therapist agreeing to be my mom long enough for me to work out this issue, I recapture my ability to scream, to cry, to object, and to be effective.  She and a couple assistants are holding a sheet over my body so I can't move up and down, only horizontally, like when I was tied down.  And when I am screaming as hard as I can scream, she rips the sheet in two, saying,  "You can't do that to my baby, get away from her!"  And she sends them off, pulls me into her arms, and rocks and soothes me, assuring me that she won't go away.  And I fall into a deep, healing slumber. And when I awaken and grow up, I discover that I don't have to be THEM  (the nurses)  I can be ME, and that I KNOW that I am powerful (I can get my mommy to take care of me)!
 
 This personal work, in turn, fed my professional commitment to providing a new, healthy childhood for all the ages of the inner child in me and my clients.  Often, it meant inventing ways to think about things, and ways to heal, for we had no maps except our own process to lead us.  Noticing the commonalities in all these different people is what laid out the cycle of development in plain view, until eventually I could see how we are designed to grow, not just in childhood, but throughout life. I had previously believed that once I completed these inner child needs, I would no longer feel them, but this is not nature's design.  We are designed to continue the cycle of growth throughout life, repeating the same states in adulthood as in childhood.  And I am still growing.